Artist Keith Langergraber

Vancouver-based artist Keith Langergraber’s work explores skateboarding culture and science fiction cults, and he often hikes out to forgotten landmarks to salvage old boards, chunks of rusting metal and other detritus for gallery installations. Rattlesnake Island, which opens this fall at the Kelowna Art Gallery, provided yet another opportunity for adventure.

Langergraber spent two weeks camping on the arid shores of Okanagan Lake, where he searched for the mythical lake serpent known as Ogopogo, and explored the island, a rocky outcrop with a bizarre history that has fascinated him since childhood. “For my generation, it was a bit of an urban myth,” says Langergraber. “It gave me an excuse to dig.”

Langergraber’s practice covers a lot of ground, but there are common threads. He often focuses on little-known histories or sub-cultures and he’s also interested in mapping, particularly what he calls mental geographies, the informal pictures we create in our minds to understand the places we frequent. Yet despite the playful quality of his work, he’s known for developing critical discourses around his ideas. This rigor helped land him on last year’s long list for the Sobey Art Award.

The centerpiece of Rattlesnake Island is a 17-minute video Langergraber taped as he camped out in the woods. At times, he talks to the camera informatively as if he were hosting a natural history show. At others, he seems almost conspiratorial, like a contestant on Survivor. The campy quality is intentional. Langergraber wants to question archetypes of the lone male in the wilderness, and by extension, the art world. “I think there’s a false romance, a sort of utopian gesture that goes along with that . . . I wanted to complicate that and pose it as problematic.”

The video, marked by haphazard camera work, represents his doppelganger, Hans Langergraber. Yet its documentary-style voiceover tells the real-life story of Lebanese immigrant Eddy Haymour, who tried to develop a Middle Eastern theme park on Rattlesnake Island in the 1970s, but was thwarted by the B.C. government. Haymour spent time in a mental hospital and then returned to Lebanon, where he stormed the Canadian Embassy. Although many locals dismissed him as paranoid, his story aired on CBC Television’s investigative news program, The Fifth Estate. The B.C. Supreme Court eventually decided the government had conspired against Haymour and ordered compensation. Haymour, who operated a hotel in nearby Peachland, published his account of the dispute in a book titled From Nuthouse to Castle.

For Langergraber, the video’s shifts in narrative style reflect his interest in the boundaries between the fictional and the real. “It starts out whimsical and funny but has this darker side,” he says. The video also makes reference to Bas Jan Ader, a Dutch conceptual artist who disappeared in 1975 during a solo sailing trip from the United States to Europe. Langergraber’s character also disappears, leaving only his kayak and a video camera in a waterproof case.

“Even though Hans Langergraber, my alter ego, fulfills the role of the romantic tragic hero, sacrificing himself to achieve the sublime, unlike Ader he never quite experiences the sublime,” says Langergraber. “He lives in a cave defaced with graffiti on the side of the highway, and then after weeks of isolation and an arduous journey, finally arrives at Rattlesnake Island. The tranquility is interrupted during an encounter with civilization. My character’s mental state undergoes a change, paralleling Haymour’s emotional transformation in regards to the distress caused by the dispute.”

Langergraber was born in Trail, B.C., but spent much of his youth in Kelowna. His childhood explorations in the woods inspired early projects dealing with forgotten historical sites, including his 2001 MFA exhibition, Removed. The exhibition featured material culled from abandoned industrial sites, including a decaying miner’s shed buckling under an avalanche of debris.

In the exhibition essay, Vancouver curator Melanie O’Brian noted that Langergraber’s work investigates tensions between deconstruction and reconstruction. “Removed seeks out and complicates the spaces within paired terminologies: site and non-site, art and artifact, chaos and stasis, the personal and the theoretical, fiction and science, deconstruction and reconstruction,” she writes. “Such an investigation confronts the fundamental systems of art and nature while it considers the legacies of earth art, conceptualism, institutional critique and how to contribute to the dialogue around these issues in contemporary art.”

After university, Langergraber continued to explore abandoned sites, including a former Chinese migrant farm on the Musqueam reserve near the Fraser River featured in a 2003 exhibition at the Alternator Gallery in Kelowna. “For me, the inherent imagery of found artifacts suggests the traces of human industry embedded in the permanence of a relentless landscape,” says Langergraber. “The collecting of objects is the basis for a scrutiny of place and history that sifts through the strata of time, looking for evidence of social, cultural and political change.”

Over the last few years, Langergraber has expanded his practice to look at different sub-cultures, particularly the skateboarding community. An avid skateboarder himself, he built a large quarter pipe for a 2009 exhibition at the Penticton Art Gallery and then invited local skateboarders to try it out.

Following his usual practice, Langergraber worked across disciplines, including a series of drawings and a video of himself skateboarding atop concrete benches he built in a Coquitlam park in conjunction with a 2007 exhibition at the Evergreen Cultural Centre. The curved surfaces of the benches were designed to appeal to skateboarders, while text on each bench refers to concrete poetry, a 1950s literary movement that treated words as visual phenomena. Langergraber’s drawings consider how skateboarders understand urban space. “Skateboarders create a mental map consisting of skate spots within a city,” he says, pointing to examples such as the wave sculpture on the Halifax waterfront and the Big O built for the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. “A skate spot is not a skate park. It’s a random mistake that’s happened in which an architectural feature is perfect for skateboarding.”

Langergraber is busy these days. He teaches at Emily Carr University in Vancouver and last summer led a northern studies field course for Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. “I ended up taking the students all the way up to Inuvik,” he says. “The course looked at the new importance of the North in regard to the environment, sovereignty and the changes this will bring to the indigenous population.” Langergraber is also preparing for a 2012 exhibition at YYZ, an artist-run centre in Toronto. He hopes to include a video that explores time travel and sci-fi cults, themes he investigated earlier this year at Western Front, an artist-run centre in Vancouver. “I’m working on a script,” he says. “I’m going to tie in the new airport in Toronto and all the science-fiction-like architecture there. Right now, as far as the whole subculture thing, that’s what I’m most interested in.”

Keith Langergraber’s Rattlesnake Island is on at the Kelowna Art Gallery October 9 to December 12, 2010.